Thursday, January 29, 2009

Boston Phoenix Reports... Chip has the "YouTube clip of 2009"

***SPECIAL THANK YOU 2 David Thorpe @ The Boston Phoenix. If it wasn't for him, none of this would have ever happened!!! Just under 1,000,000 plays on YouTube, dozens of video replys, over 10,000 comments! THANKS TO THE FANS AGAIN TOO, WITHOUT THEM NONE OF THIS IS POSSIBLE... ENJOY.***

Internet memes are kinda like wildfires: some asshole throws a cigarette butt out his car window, then he turns on the news the next day and the entire state is being evacuated and all the asshole can do is pull an Urkel voice and go, "Did I do that?" In this metaphor, as in most metaphors involving assholes, I am that asshole.

In September of 2007, a friend of mine played me a mixtape track by an up-and-coming Cleveland rapper known as Chip tha Ripper. It was an uncommonly hilarious freestyle packed with bizarre boasts and amazing taunts:

"30s on my Chevrolet call me supa dupaGarage like Roots, I got more whips than KuntaRiviera sittin' on the Bulls' best hoopaY'all still ridin' 20s, y'all some Oompa Loompas"

The greatest line, however, was the very last. Delivered with exaggerated, almost educational enunciation, it was a flamboyant whip boast the likes of which we'd never heard:

"Interior crocodile alligatorI drive a Chevrolet movie theater"

My friend rewound that line and played it over and over. It stuck out as an incredibly satisfying rap lyric, maybe the best couplet of the year: self-contained, perfectly symmetrical, and totally quotable (even if the only screen in my car is a digital clock still stuck on Daylight Saving Time). It handily beats Chamillionaire's analogous "so many screens up in the slab, I'm drivin' a computer lab" in the car-metaphor arena, which is where rap's most heated intellectual battles are fought.